Spieltheoretische Überlegungen zeigen, dass Reputationsmechanismen, wie sie auf Internet-Marktplattformen zur Anwendung kommen, prinzipiell geeignet sind, Handel in großen anonymen Märkten zu erleichtern. Dies gilt selbst dann, wenn die Marktteilnehmer ihre Identität jederzeit und kostenlos...

We report on a research program that employs the indirect evolutionary approach to analyze how the institutional environment drives the evolution of trust and trustworthiness through the evolution of moral preferences, and how in turn the evolution of preferences shapes the evolution of the...

Trust that suppliers and buyers will keep their word is a necessary ingredient to a well functioning marketplace. Nowhere is the issue trickier than for electronic markets, where transactions tend to be geographically diffuse and anonymous, putting them out of the reach of the legal safeguards...

Online reputation - "feedback" - mechanisms aim to mitigate the moral hazard problems associated with spatially distant exchange among strangers by providing traders with the type of information available in small groups, where members are frequently involved in one another's dealings. We...

A great deal of late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as eBay, which employ a second price auction with a fixed deadline. Much less late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as those run by Amazon, which employ similar auction rules, but use an ending rule that...

The internet facilitates interactive and asynchronous communication among human and artificial agents in large bilateral markets. As a consequence, new institutional structures are emerging in the new economy. I discuss a few core problems associated with the economic design of internet markets...

Experimental sealed bid first price auctions with private values in which feedback on the losing bids is provided yield lower revenues than auctions where this feedback is not given. Furthermore, bids tend to be above the equilibrium predictions for risk neutral bidders. While the latter...

We study whether selection affects motivation. In our experiment subjects first answer a personality questionnaire. They then play a 3-person game. One of the three players decides between an outside option assigning him a positive amount, but leaving the two others empty-handed and allowing one...

We examine how communication affects cooperation with the help of seven standard public goods experiments that only differ with respect to the medium of pre-play communication. Our treatments include bi-directional and unidirectional communication via (mostly electronic) auditory and/or visual...